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Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Scary Moments: There Was More Than One ‘Alien’ on the Nostromo

The most memorable single moment from Ridley Scott’s
sci-fi/horror masterpiece Alien is the
infamous chestburster scene, and justifiably so. It’s one of the most shocking gross-out
moments in film history. So effective
was the xenomorph’s onscreen birth that it actually overshadowed an equally
shocking scene that occurred much later in the film. I’m referring, of course, to the reveal of
Ash as an android. As an adult, I find
that moment, as well as the ones that directly precede and follow it, to be
most unsettling. Dare I say I find it
scarier than the chestburster, due to its underlying themes and the way those
themes are handled.

For the few people out there who’ve never seen the original Alien, I’ll offer a brief recap so as to
offer bit of context. The Nostromo is a
commercial space freighter manned by a mining crew in the furthest reaches of
the galaxy. On company orders, they interrupt
their trip back to earth to set down on an uncharted planet and explore a
downed spacecraft. Crew member Kane is
attacked by a parasite and brought back on board (against warrant officer
Ripley’s orders, as she is adhering to protocol). The parasite falls off and dies, but not before
dropping an embryo down Kane’s throat. During
a routine meal, the embryo hatches. A snake like creature suddenly bursts forth
from Kane’s chest and killing him. It
then finishes off two other crew members when they attempt to hunt it
down. Ripley, now the highest ranking
crew member, is running out of options.

After conferring with Mother, the ships computer, Ripley learns
the true nature of the Nostromo’s mission.
She also learns of Ash’s prior knowledge of and compliance with that
hidden agenda. After being startled by Ash’s sudden appearance next to her, she
angrily confronts him, and then storms off to warn the other crew members. Ash stops her and physically assaults
her. While she is incapacitated, he
rolls up a pornographic magazine and attempts to shove it down her throat. Parker and Lambert arrive in time to stop the
assault. Parker strikes Ash with a fire
extinguisher, decapitating him. The crew
revives Ash, hoping that he may know how to destroy the creature. When he informs them that the creature can’t
be killed and that their chances for survival are nil, Parker blasts him with
the flamethrower.

Even as a kid, I found Ash’s preferred murder method pretty
odd. I chalked it up to the overall
weirdness of the film, much as I did the design choices. I mean, why would anyone try to kill someone else
by shoving a magazine down their throat?
Luckily, adulthood brings with it greater understanding, not to mention
that the internet is a great tool for an enquiring mind. As it turns out, Ash wasn’t necessarily
trying to kill Ripley. According todirector Ridley Scott, he was trying to express something else:

“I figured that robots had to have, if they're sophisticated, had to
occasionally have the urge, so I said to Ash, "how do you feel about
sexual drive?". He said "great". (Sigourney laughing) So I said
"rather than just beating her up, isn't it more interesting that he
actually has always wanted to, and here's his opportunity but he doesn't have
that part"”

“If you create a model as perfect as that, it will have, almost of
necessity, a form of "emotional life." You don't have only a physical
and mental mechanism, but a machine that is capable at any moment of
uncontrollable emotional reactions and which will take certain decisions by
itself. Like HAL in 2001. Here no one has considered that in building a robot,
it had been given a psychological life, with worries and problems. This perfect
machine starts to have feelings when faced with the behavior of humans. It
starts to be interested in the women and to have desires that cannot be
expressed. Behind the assault on Ripley is an attempt to solve these tensions,
a sort of rape”

Moreso than the “face-rape” of Kane, which resulted in him
giving birth to the xenomorph, I find the whole idea of Ash trying to “rape”
Ripley deeply disturbing. The climax of
the scene plays like a virtual “money shot,” as Ash’s malfunctioning body “ejaculates”
all over the place. Once struck with the
fire extinguisher by Parker, blood/fuel begins to spew forth from his
mouth. It’s a milky white substance
(another curious design choice) that resembles…semen. Jerry Goldsmith’s musical cue when Ash’s head
gets decapitated makes the skin crawl and gets the adrenaline pumping. As Scott observed, Ash doesn’t have male
genitalia so he cannot rape or reach orgasm.
His metaphorical orgasm comes after an act of violence against
Ripley. The sexually analogous imagery
of Alien, as well as the subtext, becomes
blatantly obvious here. In Alien, sex can be equated to violence.

The capper to this whole stretch of the film is the exchange
between a temporarily revived Ash and what’s left of the Nostromo’s crew:

Ripley: Ash, can you hear me? Ash?

Ash: [speaking in an electronic, distorted voice] Yes, I can hear you.

Ripley: What was your special order?

Ash: You read it. I thought it was clear.

Ripley: What was it?

Ash: Bring back life form. Priority One. All other priorities rescinded.

Parker: The damn company. What about our lives, you
son of a bitch?

Ash: I repeat, all other priorities are rescinded.

Ripley: How do we kill it Ash? There's gotta be a
way of killing it. How? How do we do it?

Ash: You can't.

Parker: That's bullshit.

Ash: You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? Perfect
organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.

Lambert: You admire it.

Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse,
or delusions of morality.

Parker: Look, I am... I've heard enough of this,
and I'm asking you to pull the plug.

Ash: [Ripley goes to disconnect Ash, who interrupts] Last word.

Ripley: What?

Ash: I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies.

Again, the aesthetic and design choices are striking, especially
how the film visualizes artificial intelligence. Ash’s insides are not made of up gears, wires,
microchips, and circuitry. Scott favored
organics over machinery, creating a weird amalgam of the two. Ash’s blood is a milky white. His rubbery, translucent tubing looks more
like veins or a nervous system than wiring. Scott also has some interesting
ways of reminding the audience that synthetic doesn’t equal human or
living. The tubes are dotted with tiny
specs of light. His voice has an eerie
reverb/echo that makes him seem less (or maybe more) than human. It also resembles a voice from beyond the
grave. The exchange feels more like a
séance than anything.

Ash’s observations about the xenomorph resemble Quint’s
story about the U.S.S Indianapolis in a Jaws,
a film which clearly had a big influence on Alien. Though Ash doesn’t tell a story or offer a firsthand
account of a historic event, he does describe the xenomorph in a way that is
reminiscent of Quin’t description of great white sharks. The exchange also reveals something else that
the guys over at Now Playing Podcasts
smartly pointed out. The Xenomorph isn’t
the only alien in the film. When Ash
describes it, he may as well be describing himself. Perhaps he doesn’t protect the creature out
of mere compliance with company orders, but also out of a sense of
kinship. Ash acts according to his
programming and orders in the same way that the xenomorph acts according to its
primal instincts. They are kindred
spirits.

As has been observed many times, Alien is rife with sexual
subtext. In essence, it’s a film about
rape: the oral rape of Kane, the attempted oral rape of Ripley, and the
metaphorical rape of the Nostromo. The
xenomorph has free range of the giant ship once it’s hatched. It moves about like a virus, killing off crew
members like blood cells. It’s a contaminant,
the product of rape. Such ideas, and the
visuals accompany them, chill me to the bone.
But nothing, for my money, beats the surprise of finding out that Ash is
not only a robot, but a sexually criminal one at that. I don’t know where the makers of Alien got such ideas, but my imagination
is all the better for it, even if I don’t like such ideas roaming around me
brain.

2 comments:

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From the breakfast scene to the revelation of who Ash really is, there are subtle little things about his behavior that set the stage: inside the blister, he's mumbling something, the expression on his face when trying to remove the facehugger and talking to Ripley in the lab, during the fateful dinner, his face kind of drops to a weird stare...

About Me

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Scott Wilson, deep thinker and blogger extraordinaire. I'm also a published author and proud father. Last but certainly not least, I'm a single (IE Available), but I'm definitely looking to change that. My life is an ongoing work in progress, and I'm always looking to improve.